Dark & Twisty

This is taken from a class on readings in mystery. The book is Romance by Ed McBain.

Romance reminded me of a Dario Argento movie in many ways. If you don’t know Argento, he is an Italian director who became famous in the 1970’s for his thriller/horror movies. It reminds me a lot of Deep Red, a movie about a murderous insane mother.  Argento would do a pretty good job with this as a movie. He does beautiful work with stabbing and blood.

Romance, however, got a bit long in the tooth too me too early on. I think it came down to the idea of likeable characters. I liked the cops in the story, but I was glad that the Actress died.  In a mystery, I don’t think you want the reader to not really care who killed the victim.  The mystery element in the novel wasn’t strong enough for me to really care about whodunit without the compassion for the Actress.

One thing that I did like and learned from Romance was this: series writing can be rough for the reader. There were certain elements in this story that wouldn’t appear in a stand alone or if they did wouldn’t have as much significance. I think the romance in Romance had a tacked on feel. I understand why it was there though. This is a series in which the entire series is the master work not the individual novel. It’s Gestalt reading if you will, the whole as opposed to the parts.  As a reader who had no real intention of following this series after this book, I eventually just started skimming over the sections of Kling and Sharon, SharOn, SharYn, Sharyn. I also didn’t like the running gag. It doesn’t work in print. It’s like reading: what’s black and white and read all over?  The joke just isn’t there.

McBain does some wonderful characterization, however. I thought he nailed the pompous playwright, Freddie, who makes such a difference between authors and writers. He even refuses to see himself as a genre writer because it would demean his precious ego. That was just tasty. Also the guilty party was a well described, sociopath for the means of getting ahead. She almost had a manic flare to her, but the plan was too well thought out for that. I think McBain kept a good rein on the psychopathological stuff. If he would have Andrea as a psychotic or full blown manic, I’d thrown the book across the house. (I’d say room, but my house has no interior walls. Ask me about it later.)

In the hands of Argento, this could be a cracker jack movie.

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Can an incredible twist make up for tragically unlikable narrator?  In the case of Plum Island, the answer is no.  After reviewing a few critiques on our site, I can see that many people enjoyed this book despite the narrator of Corey.  I was never able to get past him.  The fact that he was narrator never allowed me to dispel my disbelief and read this novel as such. Instead, I slogged through this book ever aware of the writer.

Without the suspense of disbelief, the twist of the novel didn’t work.  I didn’t care.  I’ve tried to track down why I had such trouble with this story, for learning purposes.  The only thing I could come up with was the story being told from the first person POV of Corey.  Many found that his sarcastic interludes were great and engrossing.  I found him stereotypical.  Corey was every stereotype I’ve heard and been exposed to growing up and living in Alabama.  If you let the average person around him here in northwest Alabama read a paragraph of this book without telling the reader where this guy was from, everyone would get he was a Yankee and most would say a New York Yankee (not the baseball players).  Why?  This is how we see everyone from New York.  Many people may not even pick up on the fact that Corey is so stereotypical. In an essay in Writing Mysteries, Aaron Elkins writes about creating realistic dialog (2002). He mentions that no matter how good the plot without realistic dialog the story loses its appeal.  This is what happened with me.  The actual dialog in Plum Island might have been realistic, but Corey’s dialog (internal mostly) was so stereotypical, it was like reading bad dialog.  I never got into the work to appreciate it.  I think this a good study of being careful of stereotype and being aware that people besides the writer my perceive something as stereotypical. 

In all truth, if Plum Island hadn’t been required, I would quit reading after twenty-five pages.  Just for a little personal information, twenty-five pages is about how far I made into Treasure Island another Captain Kidd story. 

Elkins, A. (2002). How to write convincing dialog. Writing Mysteries (2^nd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books. pp 129-138.

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Well, reading class is back in session, and I’m not doing the horror reading this time.  Scott Johnson wanted way too much Clive Barker.  So I’m doing mystery.  I don’t have to keep a blog for this reading course, but I’m going to.

I just finished the book Harvest by Tess Gerritsen.  It was a medical thriller.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I usually don’t like books that is heavy on jargon, but my years of working in the hospital has made her jargon my everyday language. 

The book is pretty old being published in 1996, but it doesn’t seem too aged.  There are some telephone things that we don’t have anymore, but everything else seemed fine. The plot is very akin to a horror novel.  Russian mobsters are “adopting” out poor orphans in the post fall of communism motherland.  They then put them on ships bound for America where they harvest their organs for black market profit.  A group of doctors in Boston are in on it, and the fun begins.  The nice thing is the main character, DiMateo, seems to be going crazy.  She’s paranoid, but we find out there is a reason.  There’s some gore involved too.  Pig guts rotting in her car is a horrific highlight. 

I’ll even admit that I was tricked.  Gerritsen got me.  I don’t usually get tricked but I was so focused on the true villains name to be aware of his badness.  The ultimate evil doc was named Tarasoff, an ironic name.  The Tarasoff act is the duty to warn act to prevent harm to people in a hospital setting, but in this story, he’s the one causing the harm.  Delicious.

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I finished one of two important things.  One is my required “style” book for my MFA.  It is also the first E-book I’ve ever read.  The book was  Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Vision of Hell on Earth by Kim Paffenroth. The book does exactly what the title says it’s going to do, discuss Romero’s religious views in his zombie movies.

I read the book to get a glimpse at how other writers envision religion in the horror genre.  Religion’s always seen in vampire books and monster stories, but zombies are a bit different.  Even though Paffenroth’s book deals with movies, the ideas are still there.

The main issue this book puts forward is that Romero never overtly discusses religion beyond the “crackpot preacher” denouncing the evils of society or an occasional reference in passing.  None of the movies discussed have a preacher or religious character as a protag. Instead, what Romero appears to have done is made parallels to Dante’s Inferno.

Paffenroth discusses how each movie is another level of Hell descending to the bottom.  The movies discussed are the original Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (a shopping mall favorite), Day of the Dead, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and Land of the Dead.

Night of the Living Dead was the first and was discussed as being the darkest and most frightening of the movies because of the ending in which no one is a hero.  The story plays out with the sins of racism, sexism, classism, and murder played out well.  The things is sexism, classism, and racism are not usually thought of as sins, but they do lead to them.  The murder part of the story is not as obvious as  I had thought.  I thought the killing of the human like ghouls was the murder, but Ben, the black protag, kills the older husband.  It was all because of a power struggle. Most viewers don’t even think of it as murder, because the husband is so unlikeable, but it is.  The viewer accepts it as part of this Hell where evils can exist in almost a vacuum.

Through the rest of the movies sexism, racism, greed, gluttony, sadism, and homosexuality become the major sins.  All are shown the human characters, and the characters that deal with this sins the worse die at the hands of the zombies, but something else happens.  The zombies start to show some of these sins.  In Dawn of the Dead (both versions) the zombies start to shop a bit while rampaging through the mall. The Devil doesn’t show up until the last film, Land of the Dead, and then the devil-like character is a human that does all the sins of the previous films. 

What I learned from this book and from Romero (second hand) is that you don’t have to push the religious aspects of a book into the reader’s face.  He or she will find the message, even if it takes two or three looks for it.  Heavy-handedness isn’t need to get the point across.  Although, some would argue that ravenous hordes of the undead isn’t subtle.

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I've been needing to blog about this book for a while.  It's been over a year since I read it, and while I'm sitting here watching a meth addict take a test, I said why not?

I loved the book. A monster that grew out of a serial killer who was doing what he thought was right.  The story has lingered with me long after many things that I have read.  It was the introduction to Gary Braunbeck. I've bought other books but haven't gotten to them yet. 

The true test of how well I like this book is that I talk about it in my psychology class. The image of Mr. Hands with his nonexistant legs and giant hands sticks with me.  We discuss it when talking about en utero damage from drugs.  There's a reference in there. 

Read this book.

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I just finished Bite Me, the latest from Christopher Moore.  The book takes the story arc established in Blood-sucking Fiends and You Suck. It also as best as can be told, ends this arc.  I’m happy it did.  Even though  this story was still outrageously, Moore, and very funny at times.  It didn’t keep up the laughs that I’ve come to expect. The story takes a bit of a darker turn, which is okay with me because I am a writer and reader of darker fictions.

The story does a lot of focusing on Abby Normal.  This is okay.  It follows an order, Jody in the first book, Flood in the second, Abby in the third.  The problem is that you can only read in her voice for so long.  Then you get tired of it.  It’s hard to read her rambling, ultra catchphrase voice. ‘Kayso, now more about the book.

Vampire kitties is all I’m saying.  The world has to be avenged from the attack of the undead cats of San Francisco.  Apparently, Beijing had this problem before, and one crazy old Chinese lady remembers.

The major problem with me and this book is, the clichés.  You can only keep a story arc going for so long before you fall prey to these, and this happens.  Usually Moore builds his humor off of misusing the cliché or twisting it, but this time he gives us the smack talking “my nigga” loving Chinese granny, who only knows offense English phrase.  Give me a break, please.  There was so much more that could have been done for that character than that.

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So, I'm retroactively writing a blog about Offspring by Jack Ketchum.  This was the first book I read by the master of splat and visceral horror.  I read Off Season later. 

This book is good old fashion splatterpunk.  Many people don't like Ketchum's "Off" books because of the amount of gore and canabalism, but every horror writer has to indulge these two topics.  He just started off with them.  He was a good answer to Stephen King, when he was burning up the book lists in the beginning of the 1980's, but back to the story.  It follows the offspring of a clan of flesh eaters who inhabit the rocky coast of Maine.  I have friends from Maine, by the way, and they've never tried to eat me. 

The book deals with teens as the hunters and younger children.  It's more like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with recipes for cooking humans.  It's not as enjoyable a story as Off Season but it is still well written.  Ketchum has a way with the gore, and this book proves it.

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So I recently picked up a Jack Ketchum novel after about a year of leaving him alone.  It wasn’t a new book by Ketchum but The Lost.  I had taken a break from him after reading The Girl Next Door, which is such an intense text palate cleansing can take up to a year to complete. (I will say that The Girl Next Door is one of those rare books that leaves me with a strong impression long after reading it.  I’ve added it to the list with such works as Night, Dandelion Wine, and The Good Earth.)

The Lost isn’t going to be on my list of linger texts.  It was  a good read with plenty of pay off, but it was a slow build.  There were times when reading it that I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen next. I knew the main character/villain, Ray, was going to do something spectacularly evil, but I wasn’t sure what.

It ends up that this book is about hypocrisy.  Ray is a twenty-something guy in the late sixties who hates all things that the late sixties represented (peace, love, flower power), except drugs and certain rock bands (mainly Mary Jane and The Stones). He despises hippies, but in the end, imitates the most infamous murdering band of hippies ever, the Manson family.

Ketchum also makes a point that all the main characters are seriously flawed.  There’s a reason it’s titled the Lost instead of the Innocent.  No one is unspotted.  Almost everyone is an anti-hero or villainous protagonist. The two cops are an alcoholic who lost his family due to his work habits, and a lecherous older man who is having sex with an 18 year old.  The 18-year-old, Sally, is having the relations with this older man, which is a scandalous thing to do in the late 1960’s.  Most all the young characters are drug addicts or hoods in some fashion, but you feel for them. 

The only innocent character is Gimp the cat.  The whole time reading I knew that Ketchum was going to kill the cat.  I knew it.  In past works, he’s filleted humans and roasted them, hung them from trees to be dressed like a hog, and tortured young teen girls, so why not whack a cat.  He didn’t.  And I was glad of it. 

This book lacks a few things.  One is a satisfying ending.  The carnage is what you expect from Ketchum, bloody, brutal, and always pushing the envelop of bad taste (a Sharon Tate type murder by Ray). At the very end, Ray get convicted of his crime, but we’re left with he’s going to get AIDS and die.  For all the gore tossing at the end and beginning, and the slow suspenseful build up to Ray’s snapping, an allusion to AIDS at the end given to him during stereotypical prison rape, seems like a cop out. 

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A new author I read recently was Bryan Smith.  He is from Nashville, which intrigued me.  My wife is from Nashville.  The story to introduce me to writer was Depraved.  I don’t want to call this book a novel.  It was more like a loose connection of related short stories that really never made much sense.

The overall storyline involves a town in Tennessee where they celebrate a thanksgiving-like holiday with human for food.  There isn’t really ever an explanation as to why.  All the characters in the story are captured for this feast, which never comes. 

The most intriguing part of the “novel” was a storyline about a demon-man trying to take on a new body.  This part of the story reminded me of a old B-movie from the 1970’s called The Messiah of Evil.  Everything else in the story could be left alone. 

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Yet another wonderful book by Christopher Moore.  This one deals with the story of King Lear, but told from the point of view of the Fool.  There are great liberties taken in this text.  At one point, Pocket, the fool, ends up talking with the witches from MacBeth, but the story was gold.

The best part about this tale is that it reads like a good British sex farce, which is great because Moore is American.  Americans usually don't possess the ability to pull of very British humour. It's difficult. The Brits have such a different take on what is funny and how to present it.  Moore did excellent research on British humour, and I bet he enjoyed every minute of old Monty Python and Benny Hill episodes.

This tale is more sophisticated than a Benny Hill skit, but you can still here the music playing in the background while the characters move around. 

Of all the novels I've read so far by Moore, this one is my second favorite so far.  The only thing it needed was a blue prostitute.

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I’ve made a habit of reading a “how to” book per semester while at Seton Hill.  Okay, the  habit is a bit of a requirement, but I still read them and in some cases, more than one per semester.  This term besides On Writing Horror, which is my second time reading it (third if you count the first edition), I’ve been reading Writer’s Workshop of Horror. 

One of the things I like about books similar to WWH is that each chapter is by a different author.  This lends to easy reading.  Each chapter is an essay into itself with its own lesson.  I read the book over the whole course of the semester, not as a book to finish in a more finite time.  It lent itself well to this type of reading.

Besides, the praise I have for this book, which is plentiful, it also won this year’s Stoker Award.  So, we all know that it is a good book. 

Many times when reading these “how to” books, all the advice is the same.  This book did a different take on that.  Every author had a different topic to cover, and each brought his or her style to it.  This made for a wonderful read.  Some of the most memorable information still sticks with me. 

Gary Braunbeck wrote that he imagines characters by how they treat their coats and how they eat their cereal.  This fascinated me.  His explanation of what each treatment meant was very humorous and insightful.  We don’t often consider how the mundane things in life guide the greater parts of personality.  This is something that I cannot believe I missed before. (I worked for 7 years as a psychotherapist.  Personality is something I know.)

Robert Lee essay on how trying to be Stephen King ruined his life put a humorous take on things as well.  The essay had a very serious point that no writer should try to be another writer, nor take all advice with some grain of salt.  Ironic that such an essay would be in a “how to” book? Maybe not.

The only downside to this book was the interview sections.  To me, interviews with writers recorded in books rarely offer much insightful information.  This is case with the few interviews in this book.  I liked that several editors weighed in on the importance of the look of the project and how to keep to the rules.  I usually try to do this, but it’s nice to know that some more cavalier writers might learn from this.

The book is also assessable.  Unlike books like On Writing Horror or Stephen King’s On Writing, this book is written by mostly midlist writers in the grand scheme.  Though most of the names are familiar to the horror writer, and the true horror enthusiast, they might pass without notice by the lay population.  The book is written by writers who aren’t part of the literary superstar status.  These are the blue collar writers.  The Joes and Janes that make their living by writing and maybe some other job.  This is me or where I want to be.  It is the accessible dream.  It’s the level that I can reach.  What a great bunch of folks to get advice about writing and the business from. 

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I am going to risk failing the entire course I keep this blog for with this entry, but Cabal sucked.  That's it.  That's all I have to say.  I really don't understand how Clive Barker has made it as a writer.  He is little more than a fetishist a kin to the Marquis De Sade, without the talent.

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Ghost stories and haunted house tales are always hard for me to take. They rely on so many tropes, psychic abilities, evils of the past, weak characters haunted (no pun) by their past for me to get into them.  Although, I believe in very little in the way of monsters and other factors horror stories hand their hats on, I have the hardest time suspended disbelief when it comes to ghosts.  A vampire I can swallow; a disembodied spirit gives me heartburn.  Go figure.

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What can I say?  I love Christopher Moore.  I think that he is one of the funniest writers that I've ever read. His brand of absurdist fiction brings me great joy.  So is the case with his first published work, Practical Demonkeeping.  The story does a wonderful job of showing how strange little towns can be. 

The best thing about the story is the character of Howard Philips.  He prescribes to the HP Lovecraft view of the world, and even makes his menus in his cafe reflect this.  I never laughed harder than at this little gem. 

The story follows a man who accidently summons a demon into his control.  The man, named Travis, is a good man, but has to deal with this great evil with a liking for Cookie Monster Comic books.  The story also features how the demon, Catch , wants away from Travis.

I can't say again how funny this book is. I laughed out loud several times, which is something I rarely do when reading.  The entire idea is hillarious, but when the characters start to believe the demon is a great Old One or an earth spirit, things just get too much.

Christopher Moore is a must read.

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1967 was a time of great upheaval for our country.  Vietnam raged. Civil rights marched around the country.  The youth of the nation was causing change.  A terrifying idea for the old (literally) order.  In 1967, Ira Levin published Rosemary’s Baby. This little bit of horror (a small volume indeed) took this idea and terrified generations with it.

Rosemary Woodhouse is a young newlywed, who with her husband move into a very old apartment building haunted by a horrible history of witches, suicides, and cannibals. It is also populated nearly exclusively of old people.  The worst thing is that all the old people are witches who are bent of world domination.

As the story unwinds, we find the old people slowly manipulate the young.  This was the desire of the older population at large, to continue to control everything.  To the young reader, they would see this as a horrible thing.  The issue is that Levin hides this storyline well within the Satanic baby birthing. 

So why does Rosemary still work today, when until the recent election, the old ruled the world again?  This is because the reader doesn’t really know what is the truth and what isn’t.  The whole story is told from the tight third person POV of Rosemary.  The same character who believes that old people of the apartment are witches.  She is also pregnant at the point that the whole paranoia begins.  Could the whole tale have been pregnancy related psychosis, and of course post partum once she is no longer pregnant?  Did Rosemary simply lose the baby?  Was the baby born but because she was so nutty the others take it from her for her safety?  That is the real horror of Levin’s story.  He successfully pulls off a story that everyone thinks is about the Devil’s child, but a closer reading (and viewing if you watch the film) shows that it really could just be psychosis on Rosemary’s part. 

Having worked many years in the field of psychology/psychiatry, I have seen people who have very realistic delusional and hallucinatory beliefs and experiences.  The worst as I so often said, were the delusions that could be real life events.  This is the case with Rosemary.  Her ordeal could be real or a very elaborate delusional mindset.  That truly terrifies me.

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The Phantom of the Opera may be the most disappointing “horror” novel I have ever read.  I say disappointing because I had high hopes for this book based on so much of the other media versions of it. There are few silent movies if not early horror movies in general than The Phantom of the Opera.  Then there is the 1940’s version with Claude Raines.  These two movies give something to the phantom isn’t given in the book. 

In the 1920’s silent movie, Lon Chaney gives the Phantom a pathos and a sympathy he doesn’t quite get in the book.  In Universal Claude Raines version, the Phantom has a reason for his scarring and his strange madness.

In 1910, Gaston Leroux published the novel in its French version.  A year later, the English edition came out.  Leroux himself was a journalist that had adventure stories that would be unbelievable. 

The major problem I have with his story is that the story is rather melodramatic.  Since the story took place in a theatre, melodrama may have been the order of the day so to speak.  However, the story borders on soap opera. 

I found the characters to be rather stiff and cardboard.  They, however, fit in with characterization of the Victorian period, which the story would be written just at the end of.  With the characterization, the Phantom isn’t well rounded a villain for my taste.  He is mad, but we really never find out why he is mad.  The Persian says he’s always been like that, but he doesn’t elaborate as to why.

Speaking of the Persian, this character seems a little to convenient.  He seems to be just as knowledgeable about the L’Opera as the Opera Ghost.

The one thing that Leroux has going for him in this tale, is that he has a wonderful creepy setting.  There are few places in Paris more spectacular or mysterious as the L’Opera.  The building was construct around the time of the Franco-Prussian War.  During the siege and invasion of Paris during this war, the building was used as a store house of munitions and food products.  The below stage area of the L’Opera was cavernous and had many rooms.  Leroux took this into his story.  The Phantom is very creepy in that he can be just about anywhere in the building by using these various rooms. The greatest thing about the L’Opera is that is does have a subterranean  lake underneath it.  Leroux uses this as the location for the Phantom’s house, which is perfect.

Leroux had a great opportunity to make a wonderfully scare book with his Phantom of the Opera.  Unfortunately he was not a good enough writer to pull it off.  His journalistic style of writing wasn’t able to maintain the horror element needed for the story to be truly scary. 

The story relies on the madness of the Opera Ghost, but his madness seems random at best.  Some one say like in the musical version and the Claude Raines movie version that it is love, but the Phantom doesn’t really love Christine.  He loves having a plaything to mold to his own image.  It is a perverse love at best, which can be seen when he enslaves her.  The Phantom is scary only by the way that his cultural and personal beliefs so differ from our own, but even those elements are stereotypical to the belief about Persians and Near-Easterns during this time frame.

In more capable hands, this story would terrify.  Even though he was a horrible writer of character, it would interesting to see what Lovecraft would have done with such a horribly creepy location as the L’Opera.  What would Stoker have done with it?  Would the Phantom have been an elder god or some kind or fish person. Would Dracula have used the varied chambers to do his evil? Alas we will never know the true possibility.

Okay, I know that I’m going to get blasted for this random rambling about the story.  So do you worst.  I’ll be hiding in my lake house underneath the main building of Seton Hill awaiting your next arrival.  I’ll have my skull mask ready and my fingers cracked so I can play my pipe organ.

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I picked up this book ages ago to help me with my thesis, or I thought it would be helpful.  The book deals with the Devil coming back to a small town in Arizona to kill people with aborted fetuses.  This happens about once every 100-150 years.  A mysterious drifter (who is immortal) comes to help.

The true problem with this book is that there was a lot of build up for a very small pop.  The ending was anticlimatic and seemed to be just a flash in the pan.  When I finished the great battle scene that the author built for pages, it ended in a few paragraphs.  I had to say to myself "That was it."  The ending was disappointing.  It wasn't that good didn't triumph over evil.  It was that the end seemed so out of place.  Two hundred pages went into building the suspense of what will happen for a chapter to end it with a man splitting into and the drifter saying, "if we had been sooner that wouldn't happen."  Little just leaves us there.  We don't get an explanation about what he meant by if we had been sooner.  Why couldn't things be done without the person splitting apart.  The problem was that the sacrifice seemed to be for nothing.  The priest, who was killed by the devil, doesn't really have sympathy from the reader.

I read this book both as a writer and a reader.  Both were disappointed.  The reader wanted the story to end differently with more pizazz.  The writer learned that if you are going to build up high, you need a blow out ending to not disappoint.  I was very disappointed.  This story was built so high I needed the Death Star to explode or the Ark of Covenant to melt a bunch of Nazis.  Instead, I got two yahoos shooting giant dead babies and a priest getting rent into. 

The reader and writer in me says, avoid this book.  I may even start to avoid Little.  Until this novel, I had mostly read his short stories, which don't impress me either ("Paper Work"). So I am beginning to be disappointed with this author.

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I finally finished my reading list from June.  After all the texts I actually got grades on, I made it Edward Lee.  This particular book was not on my reading list specifically. I was just instructed to read something (or more than one text) by Ed Lee.  Golem was the only book I could find at the local book store. (Since then I found another paperback, which I bought and will get around to reading at some point.)

I will say that Ed Lee may have passed Jack Ketchum as the most disturbing writer I've ever read.  He's really intense and will not pull a single punch.  (I thought this of Ketchum until The Girl Next Door, but I'm glad he pulled the punch.) Ed Lee takes no prisoners or leaves nothing too taboo for his books.

Golem is a recent book by Lee.  It deals with a sect of Satanic Jews who deal crack and use golems to kill the competition.  There is a back story from 1880 where the ancestors of the Satanic Jews use golems to fight against prejudice.  The modern and historical story intertwine throughout the book. 

The story is set in rural Maryland, and deals with crooked sheriff's and crack dealers.  (Maryland must be different from Alabama because our big rural drug is methamphetamine.) The story revolves around a excrack addict, professor of theology and her recovering alcoholic game designing boyfriend.  They buy a house that contains a skull and some holy relics the Satanic Jews need to make more evil golems. 

The story involves a lot of dismemberment and rape.  I was surprised at the excessive number of rapes in this story. (My mentor told me to read this author after chastizing me for having too much rape in my own work of fiction.) The story is very shocking. It deals with a monster not often seen in horror literature, and he did a good job.

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Christopher Moore is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  I cannot get enough of his absurdist humor.  The latest book I've read of his is Bloodsucking Fiends.  It is the prequel to a book I've previously reviewed on this blog called You Suck! 

The story deals with a recently turned vampire and her lover who are trying to stop the evil vampire who turned her into the living dead.  The story has murder, sex, intrique, and a lot of stoner humor.  There is a mentally ill man, the Emperor, who discovers the vampire and sets out to vanquish him.  The cops get involved and people really start to believe in vampires.

The story mixes true horror with a good dose of humor.  It takes Jody (the new vamp) and Flood (her lover) and shows the thrust into the unbelievable situation.  They try to figure out how much of vampire lore is true and how much is fiction. Turning into mist truth, into a bat fiction.  It is easy to see how a typical woman and man would deal with such an outrageous situation.

I laughed out loud many times, as the characters do the most outrageous things.  This story is the perfect blind of satire, tragedy, horror, and humor.  If you read it, you'll want more Moore without a doubt.

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I recently finished three books within two days.  This is a record for me.  Dark Mountain by Richard Laymon was one of these books. 

This is the first book I've read by Laymon, and it was a potboiler for me.  I couldn't put it down.  I'm not a person who reads a book in one day.  Even small volumes like Eli Weisel's Dawn and Day, I split in two days.  Laymon's work didn't get read in a day but in three, which is excellent for me.

I picked the book because I was amazed my local bookstore (which is closing soon) had Leisure Books.  The other reason was the story was about two families being attacked in the mountains, and I thought hillbillies and horror I need to read and compare.

I was surprised.  The evil characters in the story were devil worshipping witches more than hillbillies.  They did a job on some folks too.  The thing is the story involved many angles of horror not just the idea of satanism.  Satanism isn't ever directly mentioned.  The master is mentioned but it is hard to tell if it is God or the Devil.  I air on the side of the Devil because of the whole witchcraft thing.  God in the bible says we shouldn't suffer a witch to live, so I figure he's against it.

Like Ghost Story, that takes many horror tropes and bends them around, Laymon uses a variety of horror tropes here.  He doesn't bend them that much but gives a surprise in the end that I, a cynical horror reader, was completely taken by. The horror of this story involves the creepiness of the deep woods, Satanic murders, possible untreated mental illness with homocidal ideations, religiosity, and paranoia, rape, urban life and the fear of violence, fetishism, black magic, witches, rabid animals, and zombies. There was a lot at work in this book, and it worked pretty well.

The end was the best part.  It was so horror movie wonderful.  You think that the disemboweled witch is dead, and she turns into a zombie along with her dead son and two of their victims. Wonderul twist to take away. 

The problems with the story was that some of the things the characters do is stupid in that horror movie way.  After Karen is raped, they all go back to sleep except for two.  If a creepy man just attacked a fellow camper, I'm not going back to sleep. The rape victim is too nonchalant about it.  She tells her roommate about it almost as an after thought.  "Oh yeah, some creepy hillbilly like guy raped me while I was on vacation.  Ladeda." Then even with a curse in place on the main characters, so of the situations of peril seemed contrived.  Julie and Nick are on a date.  They end up with thier tires slashed and have to call for help from a local's home.  This local ends up being a homocidal maniac.  That was too convient even with magic at play.  Duex es mechina anyone?

Despite these glaring issues, I have to say that I was pressed to complete this book.  I had to know what was going to happen next.  Unlike several authors I've read since starting this blog, I'm going to check out more of Laymon as time permits.  It's a worthwhile gesture.

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The Colorado Kid may be the worst Stephen King book ever.  Why?  Because it is an entire book that tells a story, but doesn't tell the story. The mystery of this novel is told from through the second person. The story and mystery isn't even that interesting.

I think that this book does show that the publicshing world would print anything Stephen King puts his name on.  I've noticed that the quality of King's work has gone down over time, but this really seemed to be calling it in. 

This book is several years old now, and I picked it up at the Dollar General for $1.25.  I know why.  The publishing company had a great idea: get famous authors to write old pulp style mystery's.  If The Colorado Kid is any indication of the quality of those old pulp fictions, I know why they went out of style.

Next year from Simon and Schuster, The Grocery List, by Stephen King.

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Recently, I finished reading Towing Jehovah.  The book is a satire, and a thought provoking one.  It deals with the concept of God dying.  A sullied oil tanker captain is signed up by the Vatican to tow the giant corpse of God from Sao Tome and Principe off the coast of Africa to his arctic tomb.

The story investigates what would happen to mankind if the concept that God is watching us went away.  In the story, it's called the problem of the corpse.  What happened was that people went crazy.  They became carnally focused, but only those who knew that God was dead. 

The story ends in a pleasant way.  God is buried, after an absurd attempt by a WWII reinactement group tried to sink him, and everyone of the story comes to realize that God chose to die so that mankind could move on.  He sacrificed himself for mankind again.   The people of the Earth ended up being good, just for the sake of being good, not because God was watching them.

All in all, the story was good.  I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others.  I even found that some of the atheistic ideas in it seemed to come out good in the end.

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Stephen King says that Jack Ketchem is the scariest man in America, and he may be right.  If Ketchem isn't the scariest writer out there, then he is one that is willing to push human tolerance and behaviors to the limits.  He is not afraid to show you all the horrors of being human.

The Girl Next Door proves that Ketchem isn't afraid to scare people; no to horrify them.  I've read quite a few Ketchem books in the last year.  I won't say that I enjoy reading him because his subject matter is always gruesome, but I find him easy to read.  I find him to be visceral and willing to show the horrors the way they are.  In The Girl Next Door, he takes a real life case and fictionalizes it.  It's true the Psycho is based off of Ed Gein, but it didn't delve into the true deprevaity of that man, like Ketchem did with his Ruth.

The story shows how when given the opportunity, humans will turn to their darkest parts.  When told by an authority figure that doing something morally wrong is okay, we'll do it everytime.  I say we because I think any of us will.  The true horror of The Girl Next Door is that even good people do really bad things with enough motivation.  Ketchem realizes this, and whether he meant to express it in this story or not, does show us this fact.

Think about abortion doctors.  Some people think they are the most evil humans alive because they kill babies.  These people often take it upon themself to kill the doctors.  This they justify because they are killing a killer, but they are still murdering to stop murder.  Oftentimes, the killers of these doctors are strongly evangelical Christians motivated in a fury of religiosity to stop abortion.  They use the Bible or the creed of their faith to do such things.

Ruth and the children of The Girl Next Door are no different.  They don't use the Bible as their reason for the atrocities they conduct, but their own moral code that they hold higher than religion.  It may be that if these characters had a stronger religious allifiation that these things might not ahave happened.  Maybe not. 

The horror again lies in that any of us could and may have tortured and killed Meg for no other reason than we were told to  and it was made to seem fun.

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Is having number one fans scary?  It is if you have ever read Misery. This little gem of novel is what happens when you fall victim to a nut job. Stephen King may portray one of the scariest villians ever in this book, Annie Wilkes.  "Typewriter's missing an N."  Good because the scariest villian in a novel has two in her name.

Why is Annie so scary?  For one is a severely mentall ill patient not on medications.  This leads to alot of problems.  She has an explosive temper that becomes deadly or at least maiming.  She is obsessive in things, not just Paul Sheldon. Her penguin has to be just right.  This mental illness voids all her sense of right and wrong.  She mows a state trooper with her Murray. 

The second reason Annie is so so very scary is that she is the schizophrenic mother.  Norman Bates got to play a mean momma; Annie is the real McCoy.  If you disobey her, she punishs you the best way she knows how.  She'll make you burn your "cockadoodie" manuscript.  She'll withhold needed pain medicine.  She'll even chop your foot off with an ax. My momma was mean, but nothing like this.  She never tried to cut my foot off, and she's my biggest fan.

Then Annie, in a very strange way, becomes the lover.  Paul never feels much affection for his capture, but he acts like he does, and she believes him.  She is delusional enough for this to work.  Annie loves him so much she is going to kill him and her so that no one can share their love.  That's very scary.

Although, the reader learns as the book progresses that Annie is a bonefide sociopath.,(Like we needed any cockadoodie evidence.) that's not the scariest thing about her.  Books are littered with sociopaths that never strike fear into the heart like Annie Wilkes.  It's the twisted love she has for Paul that makes her so frightening.  It's love turned on its ear.  It's the form of love a stalker has, and this time she gets her man. 

I'm you number one fan.  Good, stay away from me.

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Psycho is one of the greatest films of all time.  Sequels and remakes have attempted to catch the original lightning in a bottle, and have fail miserably.  The movie, so masterfully created by A. Hitchcock was based on the text by Bloch.  The text and the movie are similar but there are significant differences.  The text, as is typical, proves more subtle and disturbing relying on the inner moods instead of shadows and stuffed birds.  (Hitchcock and his birds.).

The main issue in the text version of Pyscho is if Norman is aware of his own illness.  This is an important part of the story because it changes the way it makes the reader feel.  Bloch never makes it clear if Norman is aware that he is his mother.  There are hints that he understands he has a different relationship with his mother.  Norman reads a lot  of books about Freudian analysis and Oedipus complex, but he also reads things that would make his mother very angry if she knew.  This would cause a psychological phenomenon called cognitve dissonnace.  Now, this could be the reason why Norman goes on his two man killing spree.  He is doing something mother wouldn't approve of, but at the same time he is his mother.  What is brain to do?  The two parts of his psyche are in direct conflict. 

This is the obvious cause for the split when Norman becomes Mrs. Bates.  The issue is does the Norman alter know what the mother alter is doing.  Bloch never makes that clear.  This wonderful for many reasons.  In terms of writing, it gives the audience the ability to make that decision.  The story is less scary to me if Norman knows what he is doing while he is mother.  So I chose to think, he has the rare and perhaps fictional dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder).  The reason why this seems scarier is that he can snap at any minute without any premeditation.  Scary stuff.  Of course not knowing, Bloch has left it up to the reader in a tiger or lady issue.  I can chose.

Bloch uses a lot of psychological issuesfor the day.  He uses it as a way of making his character ordinary and terrifying.  This is grandfather of our psychological horror in many ways.  The author helped to give birth to a new subgenre.  He did this with his use of psychopathology and not giving away much about that pathology.  It was a wonderful feat in such a small text.

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I just finished reading a how to book if you will, called How Fiction Works.  It was written by James Wood.  The main thing I learned is that this book doesn't tell you how fiction works at all.  The book is complicated to read.  The author used more 25 cent words than one text should allow.  In 248 odd pages and over 120 chapters, the author touts up realism, but never really gives a good definition of what it is.  He also bashes genre fiction along way.  This isn't unusual because that's what academics usually do.

The truly main issue of this book is that it really never addresses how fiction works.  It talks about how Gustav Flaubert is the greatest writer ever and that he made realism.  He talks about how realism has changed, and even at some point stated that realism might itself now be a genre (gasp!).  By the end, he assures his readers that realism transcends genre, and actually is the cause of genre as they react to what is not real.

This book was $12.  It had a binding that looked like something you would by for a Baptist Sunday School.  I can't say I learned anything about fiction from this book.   I did learn that genre hate is still out there.

Here's to you genre haters! 

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By today's standards, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems tame in the horror genre.  It leads to some asking whether or not it is actually horror. I think that people who would ask this may not truly understand horror beyond its slasher movie and torture porn status. 

One of the main issues of horror is to make people uncomfortable or even anxious.  Being scared isn't even part of horror.  There are many nonfiction books that are scarier than anything written in the horror genre. (Mein Kampf, Night) Dorian Gray does leave reader (or at least should) with a feeling of discomfort.  It is the story of a man who doesn't reap any of the evil he sows.  His potrait absorbs all his evil.  The man goes out and does very nasty things and never gets caught. This drives him to further and further heights of depravity and narcissism.  He gets to the point that he will do anything he wants to anyone.

In a way, Dorian Gray is a serial killer.  Because he has no need for guilt, Dorian's personality becomes such that evil means nothing to him.  He can go about his life doing good or evil and feeling nothing for it.  This is the same as any serial killer's personality trait in history.  The only difference is that serial killers have a personality flaw that makes them unremorseful.  Dorian transfers all of his to his picture.

Dorian is a pretty poison, and is there little scarier than this.  None of us like the idea that pretty people are evil, but Wilde in this story takes that away from us.  In the old days and even some now, the villians are grotesque and ugly.  Dorian is gorgeous in the eyes of men and women.  Yet, he moves about them spreading evil everywhere.  The character reminds us that the person standing beside us may be the one who will kill us.   Isn't that the way of the serial killer?

So, without  knowing it, Oscar Wilde may have written the first serial killer novel.  Although, Dorian doesn't engage in the activities of a normal serial killer novel villian, he matches the profile. 

So The Picture of Dorian Gray is a horror novel. It was ahead of its time in the fact that it takes the serial killer approach to things.  It explains this personality disorder or flaw supernaturally, having the picture take on the evil of the man, but for the most part, science (psychology or otherwise) couldn't explain such a personality.  This isn't a normal scare 'em silly horror novel.  It isn't bloody, gory, or disturbing in that way, but it is startling because it shows the evil that can be beside us.  Dorian Gray is the prototype of Patrick Bateman, or even in some ways Hannible Lector.  Think about it.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are such good characters.  It's hard not to write a lot about them.  Yesterday, I wrote a detailed account from the Freudian point of view.  Today, I'm going to do several other discussions of the duality of the characters.

Substance abuse is an easy definition of the duality of these characters.  The story is often mentioned as an allegory for substance abuse and how things and people are changed by drugs.  Dr. Jekyll made an elixir.  It released his bad side.  That's the story.  It's easy to see the comparison to drugs and alcohol.  Stevenson (the author) lived in a world of substance abuse as much as we do now.  Artists were proned to use of drugs (as they are now).  He would have seen the changes it made in friends and aquantainces.  The drug Jekyll employeed made him Hyde.  Although drugs do not really change us, they lower our inhibitions.  Alcohol doesn't make me mean.  I've got the potential for that inside me, but the depressant affects my ability to squash this.  I get drunk and angry, but the alcohol didn't make me do it.  I just didn't care because I was drunk.  (I work with a large number of drug addicts.  They always blame the drugs, but it's not the drugs.  They do their thing, and blame it on the drugs.) The elixir Jekyll makes brings out Hyde, who was already inside of him.  The drug just inhibited Jekyll so that Hyde became more dominant.  Eventually, as with drug addicts, the drug takes over.  Jekyll becomes Hyde, but knows that he was Jekyll.  This is the sad side of drug abuse.  You become the shell of who you were.

I received a comment on yesterday's blog.  It mentioned something I had forgotten.  Steveson dreamed the story.  He wrote it a feverish three days of writing.  This is a great way to get ideas, but any of us who write know that you can't just rely on dreams.  I also believe that dreams have more purpose than just Freudian ideas.  We often dream as residue of the day.  Perhaps, Stevenson was having trepidation about something in his person.  That duality thing.  This would have manifested itself in dream form and he then wrote it down.  I don't know how much of the story was told in the dream.  Mary Shelley dreamed a lot of Frankenstein, but not the whole thing.  She even changed parts to make a better story.  Stevenson himself probably did the same thing.  He undoubtedly added substance to his story to make it better.  Dreams themselves often only have one plot point if you will.  Sometimes they have a whole lot of lines of thought but nothing central.  Stevenson would have had to grapple with this and form some kind of strong story line.

Sex.  Victorians loved it, but had to keep that under wraps.  In the text of Jekyll and Hyde, we learn that Dr. Jekyll had a taste for some vice from his youth.  Showalter says it was homosexual love, but why could he just have been a letch.  Maybe he liked the prostitutes, that upper class men were to avoid.  This would also account for the duality of nature.  (Having read ahead, I think this something we see in Robert Bloch's Psycho as well.  But you'll have to wait on that.)

So here are three discussions of the duality or probable causes for Stevenson's text.  Take it for what you will.

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Recently, I finished reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  This was a story I hadn't read since high school.  After reading it, I had a prompt question concerning my take on the duality of the characters.  This led me to thinking about a variety of duality explanations.  (I previously talked about one taken by Showalter in another entry).  This entry is to look at the story from a very Victorian Freudian take. 

In Showalter's article on this work of ficition, she states that R. L. Stevenson was reading alot about the phenomenon of male hysteria. At that time, I mentioned that hysteria doesn't cause split personalities.  (Please note that hysteria doesn't exist as a diagnosis anymore.  We have something called conversion disorder that took its place.) The more intersting thing from this time in history, psychologically speaking, is Freudian psyche.  Freud came up with his concept of personality.  According to this theory, our personality is made up of three distinct parts: the id, the ego, and the super ego.

Now we are going to take a crash course in psychological history. (For readers who aren't aquaintances, I am professionally a psychotherapist and adjunct psychology instructor.  I hold a MS in clinical/applied psychology.) According to Freud, the id is the most primative part of our psyche.  We have it at birth and it is totally pleasure controlled.  It wants what feels good now without any delay.  It does not reason morally or otherwise.  It acts completely on impulse.  The ego develops by about two or three (during the anal phase of psychosexual development, where we learn potty training).  The ego is the overlord of the id.  It is focused on delayed gratification and acting not on impulse but on more logical and appropriate basis.  Lastly is the super ego.  This is the moral reasoning part of us.  It holds both the ego and id in check by establishing moral grounds for why we do things.  It is the most logical and well controlled part of the psyche.

Now, It is obvious from that quick and dirty history lesson that Mr. Hyde is the id figure.  He comes out, parties, kills folks, and is just down right nasty.  He doesn't reason things.  He acts mostly on impulse.  In Freudian idealogy, this makes him, evil, and Freud might even argue that id driven people are mostly evil.

If Hyde is the id, Jekyll is the ego.  He is more contolled and supresses his impulses, but we don't know why.  He is also the ego because he is overlord of Hyde when they are together.  He has controlled that part of himself for many years until he releases it.  We do not see the moral reasoning behind Jekyll and so that prevents him from being the super ego.

So who is the super ego?  Utterson is the super ego.  He is not part of the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, and in discussing duality, Jekyll and Hyde can only be id and ego, otherwise it would be multiplicity.  The reason Utterson is the super ego is that he is able to express moral reasons for his dislike of things and tries to rein in both Hyde and Jekyll, even when he doesn't realize that they are one in the same.  Now Freud would have something to say about this interpreation, but phooey to Freud. (All his theories have been disproven.)

In Stevenson's story, the id takes over and the ego is left no option but to destroy them both.  Freud would agree with this.  He would more than likely say a suicide was caused by the failure of the ego to surpress the id.  He would also disucss the lack of the super ego in that person. 

Now, did Stevenson know all about this when he wrote Jekyll and Hyde?  I don't know, but I doubt it.  Freud was still new to things at this time.  I really didn't read the story from this angel as much as from that of substance abuse, which is in Freudian terms, an id over ego thing.  The real reason I wrote this take on the story is because writers love Freudian theory.  I've no idea why.  The man was the biggest freak in psychology (next to B.F. Skinner).  But there we are.  Take this for what it's worth, a couple of shillings, mate.

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Today I finished reading a thesis on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  It's rather old now being published in 1990.  The author wanted to discuss the duality of character in the book.  She took the approach of stating that Stevenson wrote it as a study or discussion of male hysteria, a rare Victorian psychological ailment that was associated almost exclusively with homosexuals.

I'm going to be honest, I completely disagree with the author of this article.  Although, Jekyll and Hyde are duality of personality, I don't know if I would take it as far as calling it a homosexual story.  Much of the logic the author relies on is that the story is about men and no women are featured prominatly.  Well okay, woman are featured in a lot stories from then and now and it doesn't make it a homosexual story.   One of the things I think that the author forgets is that women didn't have to be in stories from Victorian times or even later.  Nowadays we have opposite sexes mixed into stories because I believe writers are afraid that people will call their work homosexual or find it as an undertone when there isn't one.

Why can't Jekyll/Hyde represent the duality of humans in relation to drug and alcohol use.  During this time in Britain and abroad, opium use ran rampant.  It made people seem like two different people.  The junky and the sober.  There was the belief of this time about absynth doing the same thing.  I recall a few impressionist paintings with drinkers of the green fairy as subjects.  One of the things not mention in "Dr. Jekyll's closet" was the Robert Lewis Stevenson was a sufferer of TB. He died in the South Pacific trying to recover from this ailment.  TB suffers had to take a lot of medications.  He would have seen the change this can make first hand.

I'll even take Jekyll and Hyde as sexual supression as well.  Victorians believed in rigid sexual conduct.  This story can be the split between the rational, sober, virginal male, and the opposite, the lush, the letch. 

If we are talking about hysterics, I think that we are talking wrong.  Jekyll and Hyde is more similar to DID (dissociative Identity disorder) which isn't hysteria (now called conversion disorder).  A marked change in personality due to psychological issues even then was considered schizophrenia.  The author of "Closet" seems to be mistaken.  Another issue I had with her arguement is the reliance of unpublished other writings of the story.  I have two or three writings of a story before I'm done.  I don't think you can gleen what I was thinking about in the final draft from the first draft because it changes. 

I do not believe that "Jekyll's Closet" is a good take on this story.  I find it be an attempt that started in the 1990's to make everything homosexual in its basis.  This is silly.  It would be like trying to make everything black, or hispanic to mainstream then and cut prejudice.  It doesn't work.

I believe that Jekyll's Closet could have used more indepth and wider range research.  I wrote a paper years ago on this story and several others.  I did this paper in High school.  I found reliable source as well that stated it was about the duality of man because of substance abuse.  If I were going to argue the meaning of the duality in this story, like our author did, then I would want all possible answers to the question.  That's being a good scientist, which is what I was first trained to be then a writer. 

No scientific theory or hypothesis would be taken seriously based on such loose and shaky evidence or just taken from one  source without discussion of other possibilities.  I know this isn't science but I think critiquing of works should hold to the same standards.  Prove why it is your theory and how it disproves the others.  "Dr. Jekyll's Closet" fails to do this.

(And it just made me angry)

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I just finished reading How to Write Killer Fiction by Wheat.  Wow!  I usually never say that about a writing book or style manual but this book really made me think.  She throroughly discussed the differences in mystery and thriller styles but also the differences in the way they are written.

I realized while reading this book exactly what kind of writer I am and have been.  I also realized via this book and the reboot of my thesis novel what type I need to be. I have always been what Wheat calls a "blankpager".  I never write out an outline before I start to write.  I mostly outline in my head and keep it there.  The problem is as I've gotten older (I have a magic date birthday coming up soon.) and become more stressed with my two jobs, I can't hold as much in my memory without letting some things slip.  I don't like to admit this because I keep everything in my head from appointments to phone numbers, email address to birthdates and other important facts and figures.  This has hurt me greatly.  I believe the best evidence for this was my original thesis project.  I had an outline in my head that actually had a central plot, but somewhere in the mix of psychology notes and stastics, and phone numbers for half the mental health centers in Alabama, it got lost.  If I had been an "outliner", i wouldn't have lost this as readily.

I'll admit that one of the reasons I have avoid outlines is that I felt it hindered my creative ability to be flexible in my story.  I'll see or hear something and say "that would be great."  As I read, this book I realized that a outline can be made to incoporate changes.  I also learned this outling for my new thesis novel.  I wrote at times a specific outline even adding in dialog for that section but also some generalities like "put something creepy here."  I think, and whether or not this was Wheat's intention, that an outline can just keep you focused on the central plot and makes sure you have it running through the story.

Another thing she discussed was the arc system.  By nature, I'm a short story writer.  I like the small bite-sized story.  For one thing, I don't get bored with it.  Novel writing gets boring about midway and then picks up toward the end, but  you have to push through that boredom.  The arc system seems to  me a wonderful way to keep things in perspective.  They make it so you write small sections of story with that central theme running through them.  I had done this my outlining process and not even realized that what I was doing.

Writing is an amazing job/hobby/academic pursuit/coping skill/art/enjoyment/guilty pleasure.  You can learn so much you didn't know tot make it more enjoyable, but you can also realize that you've been doing stuff you didn't even know had a name.

Although I write mostly horror and occasional absurdist fiction (a new interest of mine), I drew alot out of this mystery and thriller book.  I think that everyone should read it. But it may be my belief that you can learn much about writing from anyting about it.  I have journalism books that I learn about writing from.  I've sat through Romance writing worshops and writing for the Christian market (and let's be frank, Hillybilly rape ain't big in that market.) and I always bring something away with me.

How to Write Killer Fiction can teach you how to write killer fiction but not just stories about killing, fiction that will slay the reader.

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I have one thing to say.  If all of Faulkner's work was as fun and easy to read as this, more people would be reading Faulkner.

This book is a Southern gothic noir story.  It is set in several areas across Mississippi, Memphis, and even give Birmingham, AL a shout out.  The story follows  the trail of black man accused of raping a girl and murdering a mentally retarded man.  It also follows the kidnapping of Temple a deb who is the girl accused of being raped.

In reality, she was raped by a man named Popeye (not the sailor).  He is little more than a antisocial personality disorder, who was scarred by his mothers syphallis.  He is impotent and it drives most of his criminality. HE raped Temple with a corn cob but told her it was his junk.  The girl bleeds profusely but doesn't realize that she's been raped with a corncob.  As the story goes on, Temple falls in love Popeye who makes her have sex with another man whle he watches. 

This story revolves around much of this antisocial behavior.  The Temple character even becomes evil. She lets the innocent black man take the rap for her rape and the murder.  All the man is guilty of is bootlegging, and being dumb enough to let these people hang around his joint.

Now, this story is wonderfully Southern Gothic.  The settings are dark and brooding as are the characters.  You don't know who to trust.  There is even overtones of horror.  The grotesque exists in the characters who float around. 

Other backwoods stories can be seen in this story.  I got the feeling of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  There are so many of these disgusting characters floating around. 

Faulkner can teach alot about writing, but his control of language, local color and dialect is superb.  I'm Southern (from Alabama not far from Birmingham,  yo!)  I enjoyed reading this tale out loud during the dialetical parts.  His way of coming up with spelling and pronunciation was excellent.

I greatly enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from it.  A good read.  A really good read.

Posted by Jared at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card was a quick read for a writing book.  When I started it, I thought to myself, "why am I reading this book?  I don't write sci fi or fantasy."  I figured it out not long before finishing it.  The elements he talked about using were just as important for writing any type of fiction as it is for scifi or fantasy.

I took notice when discussing world building.  I have always thought of this just for fantasy and sci fi.  The term always seemed to mean to literally build a world.  If it was sci fi, then the planetary issues and fantasy the world of the fantastical.  The thing is any world in fiction has to be built even when it is the real world.  Certain aspects of the fictional world have to be totally understood and sold.  If the story has factors of laws that don't exist in our world, let's say that after 3 attempts of suicide the person has to be killed.  This story needs a world to be built  This world is where some law makers have decided that the time for rampant suicide attempts were over. 

Although the above is a "real" world scenario, there are not laws like that.  It has to be built so that the reader will accept it.  This is an easy example, but so much must go into it. 

As I read Card's book further, I realized that horror is a form of fantasy even when it is in the real world. Monsters aren't real, but writer's bind them with their own laws and rules.  Maybe the monster can come out in the day light but not at night.  Maybe it eats only little children.  Maybe it's afraid of Chuck Norris and all images of him.  This is all world building.

The most important thing from Card's book is the MICE algorythm.  This helps the writer determine what type of story they are writing.  M (milleu) I (Idea) C (character) and E (I don't remember, but I've go tthe book at home) [I do a lot of blog writing from work].  This is helpful because when writing and a plot is waffling looking at the MICE will help determine where the story should go or if it needs revamping or not from a different perspective.

I enjoyed this book on writing.  The most important thing it provided was setting me to thinking about the art of writing and how to get plot and things straightened out.  The book is rather old now.  It's pushing 20 years, but I've read them much older like Elements of Style  or On Writing Well by Zensser.  The book still holds true.

Posted by Jared at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Writing Journal: On Writing Horror

On Writing Horror was a production of the HWA to advise novice writers of the art and “science” of writing horror.  It has essays from a myriad of the organization's membership. The first bit of advice that seems to stick out is from the essay by Wayne Allen Salle.  He posits in a boiled down form that writers should write what is the truth of the character and the story not just what they know.  Oftentimes when a writer reads The Writer or Writer's Digest, he or she is given the advice to “write what you know.”  That is all well and good, but some people do not know that much or have such a narrow scope of knowledge that his or her writing would be very boring.  Salle seems to say that it is important to write as accurately as a writer can about the subject that he or she knows about, but that it is also important to realize in the world that the writer has created that there are certain truths that transcend what the writer knows to the laws and truths of the “real world.”  Being a stickler for the exact facts and “just the facts ma'am” may not be true to the story and its characters and nuances. The following essay by Michael Marano seems to lead into the idea that a writer can learn more that what he or she knows about a subject by borrowing the idea of method acting.  He states that a writer can go to the scary places being written about by studying them closely or even submerging himself or herself into the situation.

            Much of the text deals with the idea of improved writing itself.  Several of the veterans talk about getting the bones down.  They discuss the syntax and formation of lines and sentences.  They talk about getting things moving and keeping them at a pace that adds to the writing.  All these things are important to keep in mind while reading.  Sometimes it is easy to get bogged down in the story or in the process of writing.  What tends to happen is the story stalls somewhere far from the end, and it may be abandoned and then forgotten.  This particular text deals with this issue, and the issues of finishing a work, pimping and selling the work, and avoiding the clichés that everyone is tired of. 

            Some of the topics discussed in the text go against some of the advice given in other works.  As mentioned earlier, writing magazines often discuss the write-what-you-know formula.  This can be problematic for horror and spec fiction writers because the worlds and situations that we write about are unknown because they are for the most part unreal.  The previous edition of this text written in the late 1990's had much of the same advice as the current edition.  This is no shock because later editions often just add a few new articles or paragraphs but keep the initial text as close to the earlier editions.  This new edition, however, adds many new sections and discusses the changes in the market that have happened over the last decade.  The advice about storytelling and doing so in a grammatical fashion stands up across other composition related texts.

            This book is thorough in its explanations of writing horror.  It covers most every aspect of the profession, and little would need to be added.  The section that discusses mental illness, personality disorders, and other mental defects might be longer and injected with more information.  Horror fiction relies on the psychological. Unfortunately, not many writers, especially novices understand the psychology of fear and dread.  Most have little knowledge of psychology and psychopathology beyond an introductory course in college.  This adds to much erroneous writing about the psychological factors of depravity.  This section could be moved nearer the front and stressed more.  (This idea would hopefully keep the novice or none psychologically sophisticated writer from confusing someone being psychotic or sociopathic.) The section on redneck horror could be more informative as well.  As the author of that essay said, rednecks do not live exclusively in the South, but most people think they do. The discussion of the stereotype bias for this subset of the American population might be stressed more.  Publishers and reading audiences would not tolerate a book or story filled the stereotyping of city dwellers that a rural writer might make.  Why should they tolerate the stereotype of country dwellers by urban (not urbane mind you) writers?  Because rednecks do not read perhaps, but hillbillies   do (and they're watching, 'cause I'm one of them.)

            Examples are given to help people understand things better.  In my own writing I have a few examples that stand out to some of the points made by the authors in this text.  In a my story “Dr. Kildare's Favorite Color”, a nurse on a psychiatric unit makes a statement that in real life a good and wizen nurse, like the character in this story, would never say.  The director of my unit (a psych unit) read this work upon publication.  She brought to my attention that a real psych nurse would never make a statement like that to a patient.  Although I had not written what I knew to be true in the real world, I had written the truth for the story's world.  In that world, this nurse would have said that because the rules and laws were different.  This falls in to the idea of writing what  you know but also being true to the story you are writing and the rules that are involved in that world.

            Everyone is different.  I hope that is not a shock to most people.  On Writing Horror is edited by a single editor, but it is filled with works by numerous authors.  Each other shares his or her advice to the novice writer who has picked up the text.  The problem is that advice is just a suggestion of something that work for this person so it might work for you.  In a perfect world, all advice given when implemented would turn out to the same result.  That would be a good spec fiction work, but reality is totally different.  It is not difficult to come up with an idea or situation in which a writer might have to vary from the advice given in this book.  Dues ex machina, the dreaded god in the machine, is an example.  This wonderful plot solver is frowned upon but keeps coming up over and over again.  Why? Some situations warrant it.  I can think of this in Stephen King's Dark Tower Series. Many times convenient things happen for the characters brought about by dues ex machina.  In the stories, this problem is solved by saying that the author, Stephen King, who in a way is a god, leaves these things in his story as he writes about these characters.  It is still a convenient way to get characters out of a corner.  Time travel stories also have the advantage of using this device because of characters remembering to leave stuff behind so that the time traveler can use it.  Isn't the sun coming up just at the right moment in a vampire story much the same thing?

            If teaching this book in a module, the section that talks about the psychopathology of characters would be a main focus.  This is because I know this, and you should always teach what you know.  The psychological constructs of a character's mind is also very important.  It can be handled sloppily and mess a story completely up, but it can be handled masterfully and make the story excel and be a page turner that the reader cannot put down.  This concept is also very easy to grasp.  Although psychology is brain science, it's not brain surgery.  Just a little knowledge of mental illness, personality disorders, and cognitive functioning and processing can add much to a story and its characters.

            On Writing Horror has been a useful guide while writing.  It offers not only tips on how to write better but also lists of books that may aid the writer in improving their concept of the genre and what has been done very well in the past.

Posted by Jared at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 These are entries from my original blog.  There are several on Dr. Moreau.

Who is the monster on Dr. Moreau’s Island? - 3.10.09

The answer to the topic is, everyone.

Everyone on that island is a monster in some way. The narrator becomes one trying to frighten the manimals into obedience. Moreau and his sadistic vision is easily defined as monsterous. Montgomery, of course a monster. The manimals are by definition monsters even though they are mostly good. Then there is the real monster

The island is the monster. I said it there it is. How can an island be a monster, Jared?

Thanks for asking.

Easy. Everyone there goes nuts. Sure Moreau was nuts before he got there, but look at the effect on the others. Of course the island drives them crazy. They are stuck in the middle of the South Pacific with no help and no way of communicating. I’d go crazy to. Dr. Moreau’s Island is like the hotel in The Shining. It isn’t haunted, but it is a malevolent character that drives the other story characters into doing horrible things. So it is the ultimate monster. One last point, this kind of stuff wouldn’t have happened on any other island or location. I like when location is monster.

***

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1995) - 3.10.09

Jared

Where else would you find Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando in a movie but on Dr. Moreau’s island? No where. Only something as weird as this tale could get these two giants of the cinema together.

So this movie not so good, but an interesting take on Moreau’s twisted ideas. The movie moves away from vivesection to genetic manipulation, which is good because it makes more sense. The problem is everyone is either a loony tune or a drug addict. There was more dope smoked on screen and in the making of this movie than Up in Smoke. There was also a lot of monkey love.

The story carries it own. The evilness or madness of Moreau’s idea still carries over in this adaptation. Brando is not very convincing. I keep thinking about Dom Deluise in Robin Hood: Men in Tights. “You should come over for a canolli.”

So as I have reviewed movies based off the works we have read. I liked the book better than the movie. The movie to me is also not as well known as other works which makes it a bit obscure for most movie viewers. The concept and special effects were wonderful. I loved the pregnant manimal giving birth and having 6 nipples. That was sweet. The little rat people were good too. The love story was too much for me, and like all American movies, has to be there to please the masses. Stupid masses.

***

Fall of the House of Pain - 3.10.09

Besides being a band from the 1980’s or 1990’s (with such good music who can remember), the house of pain was the major disciplinary hut for Dr. Moreau.

Moreau was a sadist, no doubt about it. He wasn’t even a fun sadist either. There was no spanking or ball gags for him, nope just straight cut you up put you back together fun. Nothing says sweet delicious pain like that. The house of pain was his lab. He performed his sadistic rituals here and called it science. Like Callie said in her poem, the ideas were heavily based on evolutionary theory, either Darwinism or something else. The author is a product of his own beliefs. H.G. Wells didn’t care too much for religion. Some people might call him an atheist. He probably was. He put his belief in science no matter how brutal. His story mixed the two. Although Moreau doesn’t seem to have religion, he passes himself off as a god and gives the manimals he created 10 commandments of sorts. Not to walk on all fours that is the law.

The story seems to be this is what happens when science and religion try to mix. Science always wins. In this story it did. The house of Pain fell because the animals went back to their instincts proven scientifically.

Is Wells saying this? I think so.

***

A psych analysis of Dr. Moreau - 3.7.09

Arznen wanted it, so here it is.

In my professional opinion, Dr. Moreau was a nut job. That’s technical professional terminology.

In the truest since of things, Moreau does not have a diagnosis as such. He is not schizophrenic because he wouldn’t be able to do what he has done if he was. Schizophrenics are too loose to be able to make human-shaped animals. The fact is, he suffers from personality issues if not disorders.

The first disorder I think he would suffer from would be narcissism. It is obvious that he thinks very highly of himself, but when challenged has very little underneath to support it. This is the reason he fashions himself as a god if not God himself.

I think as we delve deeper in Moreau that he also suffers from Antisocial personality disorder. As many know, this is called the serial killer disorder. I don’t think Moreau was a serial killer and that title for the disorder is a misnomer. The true traits of this disorder is a total disregard for rules and life. Moreau makes his own rules and has no regard for life human, or manimal. We know that early on people who suffer from this personality disorder torture animals. I would say Moreau fits this. He just never stopped.

Oftentimes if not always, we find antisocial and narcissistic personality disorder walks hand in hand. They are as we say professionally “comorbid”. This is reason most serial killers get caught. They feel that they can’t (the narcissism) and do something over the top. (Think about the Unibomber and his manifesto, the BTK killer and his letters written from his church’s computer, or the Cheryl Tate slayings of the Manson family). Moreau does this and it gets him killed by his manimals.

So for an analysis of Moreau this is it. He has no Axis I diagnosis (ie typical mental illness). he suffers from at least two Axis II diagnoses (personality disorders) Antisocial and narcissistic. Some might argue he also suffers from Schizoid PD due to his hermit type life but he doesn’t seem to have the psuedo-psychotic features for this. If he has a third PD, it would be avoidant, which is a shyness type PD which migh explain his want to live alone on a island with manimals.

***

The Planet of Dr. Moreau - 3.6.09

In my strange wonderings, I thought what would happen if Dr. Moreau landed on the Planet of the Apes. I would watch this movie. Would he be bent to make the humans more ape like? Would Dr. Zaius turn around and make Moreau in his own image.

I think that it would be an interesting idea for a story. Imagine a man who has made men from apes on a planet where apes have evolved past men. It is great. He would caught up in a strange version of his own story. In ways it reflects what happens. The creatures Moreau make kill him, doubtless the Apes from POA would do the same, but they might vivasect him, which would be only his just rewards for the cruelty he instills on this victims

***

Let’s make Manimals - 3.5.09

Dr. Moreau was a good man. He liked animals so much he decided to make them human by experimenting with them and causing them considerable pain. That’s a great way to say I love you. Here kitty, kitty, I’m going to make you a manimal. Not only that I’m going to not give you guidance but expect you to know the ways of man and act like him.

I think that Dr. Moreau should have read or seen The Jungle Book. King Louie would really like to be like you. See Moreau wouldn’t have to made Manimals. H.G. Wells meet King Louie.

Posted by Jared at 07:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is from a writing journal from first semester at Seton Hill University.

Of all the selections for my reading assignments this semester, the worst book by far was The Ruins by Scott Smith.  The purpose of reading in our genre and books about writing and of an academic nature is to learn what to do to make writing better.  The purpose is also to introduce us to books and subgenres we might overlook due general disinterest in that subset.  Little was gleamed from The Ruins that I would want to use in my own writing. 

            From the start, the book’s characters were stock.  Each one was a cardboard cut out that I as the reader had no empathy for.  The characters had so little developed personality that when they were talking without taglines, they became indistinguishable.  The characters seemed unreal and unlikable.  No connection or care was ever made to them.  Each character had finished college and was heading to graduate school, medical school, or work.  Each came from the New York or some urban-type area.  Each was a WASP.  Even the minor characters held no sympathy.  The German could have been taken straight from Hogan’s Heroes.  The Greek characters played like Greek stereotypes on BBC comedies.  From the start, I wanted these characters to die.  I did not care how, a bus wreck would have done fine; plus, I would not need to wait 300 pages for a bunch of vines to eat them.

            I have trouble with characterization sometimes.  It happens to be an area I have tried to work on and have looked at in the books I have read.  Smith has the same problem and did not try to fix it.  In my own writing, I have tried to be mindful of not making characters stock characters.  This would be easy to do in my current project due to dealing with hillbillies.  As I write dialog, I listen to the voice and the words.  I may even say the lines out loud so I can tell if the characters sound too much alike.  The horrible job on characterization by Smith in this book has definitely taught me what to look for and avoid.

            In this text, the story is told from the point of view of the four main (boring) characters.  The scenes swap back and forth from character to character.  Oftentimes, the same scene is played out in its entirety through two or three points of view.  This not only became distracting; it became annoying.  This method of narrating did not seem to move the story forward either.  It bogged it down and slowed the pace even more than it was already slowed to.  There is nothing wrong with multiple points of view in a story.  It is a good practice to give the story depth.  I use multiple points of view myself.  The problem is when it bogs the story down.  The Ruins girth in pages relied solely on the redundant point of view.  It seems that Smith was trying to make the book more artsy or cutting edge by doing this.  Instead, it came out looking amateurish.  As I have been writing, I caught myself doing this exact thing, writing the same scene from a different point of view.  I now call it “The Ruins Effect”.  When I (and my critique partners) caught this, I got rid of it with a large machete better used for chopping the killer Southern vine of kudzu.  Something positive I got from this book, and I am amazed.

            Again, there was so much of what not to do from this book.  The villains in this story do not make sense.  They are described clearly, but they are intelligent, carnivorous vines.  There is no explanation to why the vines are there.  There is no reason given as to why the Mayan characters keep people there, except to prevent the spread of the vine, which Roundup or Agent Orange would deal with handily.  When I write speculative fiction, I get that the villains and situations are going to be a stretch that requires suspension of belief, but I believe there needs to be some logic to things too.  Even a delusional person who is totally out of his mind within his own delusions finds them logical.  There is no logical explanation of the villains or the motives.  They just eat.  Even if survival is the main drive for a character it should be explained in some way.  When I write, I always have the logic behind why someone does what he does in my mind.  It doesn’t always get written down the first time.  Upon editing, it gets in there.  It explains to the reader why this is happening.  This section of The Ruins gives further support and reinforcement as to why this needs to be done.

            I am a title person.  I have pointed this out in other essays.  The Ruins is a creepy title with so much potential.  That’s why I wanted to read it, because I thought it was going to deal with great ancient Mayan evils.  The characters never even make it to any ruins. Most of the action takes place at an abandoned mine.  The title is a total let down.  It should have been called The Killer Vines of the Abandoned Mine and the Idiots who Went There.  Another obvious reinforcement for striving for the best title.

            Two other things need discussing.  The book read like it was written to be a movie.  I have been guilty and still remain guilty of thinking about my story in cinematic terms.  I often write with movie shots in mind.  This story has opened my eyes to how poorly that translates onto the pulp paper.  The story lacked so much because it was written that way.  I have become more aware of the way I write, my metawriting if you will.  Every time I seem to be starting writing with the 20^th Century Fox music playing in my head, I stop and think and write differently.   The last thing to discuss and again something I have been guilty of and see how silly it looks on the page.  When the story’s point-of-view characters have died, the story needs to end.  There is no one to tell the story anymore, even in the third person. If you have been in a character or characters head(s) for the whole book and they die, whose perspective is the story being told from?  The answer is something that does not work and seems very amateurish.  I blush thinking about all the stories I have made this mistake in.  I have started to look at where the story is going to end before I decide who needs to tell it.  In The Ruins, the story closes when non-point-of-view characters show up and repeat the process of the first set of characters.  It ends like a horror movie.  You can almost see the screen fade to black and expect a boring sequel.  I have put these two things in my do not do file.

            So The Ruins did not have too many points to immolate.  It did have many points to avoid, and learning is both imitation and aversion.  From all the text I read for this semester, I took more away from this one to improve my writing.  Often the best example is the worst example.

Posted by Jared at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This comes from a writing journal from my first semester at Seton Hill University.  Part of the program is reading academic books.  This is the one I chose.

            The academic book that my mentor and I chose for this semester comes from my background in psychology.  It is the text by Sigmund Freud called Totem and Taboo.  This book is a description of Freud’s theory of incest taboo and how it relates to the development of humans.  Freud stated that the incest taboo is what makes humans successfully leave the phallic stage of development.  He stated that during this stage the Oedipus and Elektra Complexes begin, and incest taboo vanquishes these disorders. 

            Now what does the premier text on Freudian incest taboo theory have to do with writing?  It happens that one of the major plot points of my thesis rests on incest and a cult built around the idea of incest. Freud was one of the first researches to spend time thinking and theorizing about things like incest.  He believed that we first become incestuous because of deep-seated sexual desires for our parents of the opposite gender that he theorized occurred during the phallic stage of development.  This text looks at the aboriginal people of Australia and other Oceania countries.  He found that even these “primitive” people had a distaste of incest.  He stated that to these natives incest surpassed just blood relations and extended to members of the same tribe.  He theorized that people of the same “totem” or spirit guide would not intermarry or breed with one another. 

            The villainous characters of my thesis are members of an incestuous cult.  They believe that a prophecy handed down from God gives them permission to mate with their family.  Freud’s theory strictly forbids this and says that even the most “amoral” people abhor incest and avoid it to great extents.  This theory applies to my thesis because the characters according to Totem and Taboo are lower developmentally than the private peoples of the world of not our time but the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.  It gives a vision into the psyche of these characters who handed down this prophecy from God. 

            Freud’s basic idea is that people choose to be incestuous.  He states in a very round about way that normal humans left to their own decisions and basic ideologies and programming will not go toward incestuous love and breeding.  He says that people are instinctually appalled by incest after the age of about 5 or 6.  The impact on my thesis is that Freud’s basic research over 100 years ago still holds true. (One of the few Freudian theories that can.)  Contemporary researchers will tell you that there is not an instinctual drive to mate with ones own kin. 

            In my thesis this lack of the incest taboo would mean that the characters, named the Hassle family, are cognitively around 3 to 5-years-old, or they have been made to think like that age group.  The cognitive age the characters have to be affects how they are written.  It affects their verbiage and syntax.  It also affects their behavior.  These are characters that have been trained to have the thought processes of young children; yet, they are adults and pubescent children.  They have desires that young children do not fully understand, and they can act on them.  The Hassles are then little more than animals driven solely by the drive to procreate.

            Freud would view this as just the case. He would say that these characters if they were real people would be little more than overly developed apes.  He would see them as less advanced than any “primitive” peoples of the world.  In all likelihood, he would have written a study about them. 

            In writing popular fiction, the old classic ideas are hardly seen anymore.  Freud has been written off for the most part as a perverted kook.  Few of his theories are still used or hold much water.  Incest taboo, however, still has a place in psychological study and practice.  There is a real aversion to marrying and interbreeding with family members.  Federal and state laws prohibit close relatives from marrying.  Popular culture jokes and shows the effects of what first cousins marrying will do.  The idea of incestuous people being less than human is really not looked at that much.  The primal sex drive overpowering one of our deepest phobias is not often investigated.

            What would Freud think of this thesis? He would find it to be a work of cathartic release.  He would say that the author never quite made it out of the phallic stage and still held on to his Oedipus Complex and incestuous desires that successful completion of that stage would have eliminated.  He would (strangely enough) think that the thesis was a healthy defense mechanism for the author to get his repressed feelings out of the way so that he could move on past his phallic hang-ups. 

            So Totem and Taboo, a text about incest taboo in primitive peoples by Sigmund Freud, can actually be a writing aid.  It does not teach anyone how to write better structurally, but it can and does give insight into how to characterize people who suffer from serious hang-ups like incest.  Taking the Freudian approach that such characters would still be trapped in an underdeveloped stage cognitively adds much depth to the characters and the story.

Posted by Jared at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is taken from a writing journal from my first semester at Seton Hill Universisty.

            Writing can be a difficult venture.  It requires time, patience, and a very thick skin.  To be a successful writer, you have to learn from experience and from other writers.  Genre writers often are looked down on as hacks. So when a book comes along that easily falls into a genre, and it wins a prestigious award, things look up for genre writers.  The Road is just the case. Written by Cormac McCarthy, it won the Pulitzer Prize and made it onto the much envied Oprah Book List.  McCarthy is considered a literary writer, greatly due to his unique style of writing and use of syntax. The Road, however, moves into the realm of speculative fiction. 

            One of the hardest things about writing is the feeling of claustrophobia.  Oftentimes, a story or novel takes place in a constrained setting.  The tight walls encompassing the story make writing it feel constricted.  The Road is a very claustrophobic story, although it takes place over a wide expanse of landscape.  The way McCarthy deals with this and makes the story more claustrophobic and frightening, is to tell  the story from one perspective for most of the book.  We never leave the mind of the main character (he) until his death.  Two things can be learn from this technique.  One, it teaches how to keep a constricted story moving and lively.  The main problem with constricting stories, as I have found them, is they get stale so easily.  When you are writing in a shoe box, you run out of physical room.  McCarthy moves from the physical area to the psychological and cognitive areas.  He delves into the mind of the he character.  McCarthy shows his fears and desires.  He shows us the world of this story through those scared eyes.  With my writing, characterization and length are often problems.  These can walk hand in hand.  When characterization is limited, the length, depth, and breadth of the work is hindered.  Although this story was not a very long one, it still filled out its story and pages with psychological study as well as action.  The second part of this argument comes from that.  The action of the story is limited, but again the reader keeps turning the page.  The world is well described with sparse words and descriptions, but it is so vivid. Action outside of walking and starving rarely comes.  The description of this is what makes the story work.  With brief discussion of the horrible actions of the other characters in the book, the reader keeps turning the pages to see if the two characters are going to run into more dangers.  Page-turning writing is always good to learn from.  The problem is that in most genre fiction, readers demand more action than is provided in this book. 

            As I think about writing, I take into account the way McCarthy uses claustrophobia and sparse, intensely described action to his advantage.  Claustrophobia is frightening.  Studies have shown it is one of the most common fears among Americans.  It plays a key part in horror writing and is hard to pull off.  The way McCarthy does this with views into the characters mind is something to take into consideration.  His descriptions of the horror, which other humans have preformed on each other and the hints of the evil they will do, gives the prefect tease that a good horror story needs.  Oftentimes, I give too much away too quickly, or not enough away too slowly.  While I have been writing, I have been attempting to keep this technique in mind.  It is a delicate game of how much detail to give and how much to keep back.

            A few things did not work in the story or were distracting.  Besides McCarthy penchant for not using much punctuation, the fact that the characters are only named he and boy became hard to follow at times.  During dialog,  the pronoun he would often refer not to the main character but the boy.  I found myself having to go back and read over again to realize who was talking, because the characters often spoke so similarly.  When writing, I have found that I have run into similar situations.  I have seen how it does in this and other books and work hard to avoid the issue by either being clear in the tag or making the voice of each character distinct enough to make a difference. 

            Then there was the ending.  I am not opposed to a wonderful happy ending, but the ending of the story was very stark to me.  It was also unclear if it was real or Heaven.  The main character dies requiring a shift in point of view to the boy, who had not had a point of view in the book.  This was a problem that I found to be a bit amateurish.  If I had sent this story back to the author, I would have asked for that to be made different.  The ending was also a little unrealistic, which caused me to think that it was Heaven instead of real place.  The whole story existed in a dead, ashen world, but at the end, the characters end up in a beautiful live valley.  It was almost like the make-believe farm of Lenny and George in Of Mice and Men.  It was Eden in a place that did not have Eden.  The thing is that in horror an ending like that would be scoffed as too cinematic even if it meant everyone was dead.  After all the bleakness, it seemed like a cop out.  When writing, I want the ending to be realistic, no matter how unrealistic the story is.  Even in unrealistic or future worlds logic and truth still exist, at least in my worlds.  If a happy ending is not possible, as I felt it was not in The Road, why force it?  Equally if a happy ending or at least pleasant ending is logical and will work why not use it?

            The Road  has made me look at the endings of the stories I write to make sure they fit.  Many writers work hard to avoid the deus ex machina parts of a story, but an unrealistic ending achieved by normal means is no different from a god descending from the sky and fixing everything.  This seemed to happen in The Road, and it disappointed me. 

            Writing is a difficult art.  There is much to balance and keep check of.  The Road had many things that a writer can learn from, and many things to avoid.  The tight writing that expands out of a claustrophobic setting and the brief vivid descriptions of horror were positives.  The pie in the sky (literal or figuratively) ending was something to avoid.

Posted by Jared at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a copy of a writing journal from my first semester at Seton Hill University.

            Peter Straub wrote Ghost Story over thirty years ago during a time when horror writing lay in a shallow grave.  His story about ghouls shook up the genre.  The story takes the typical paradigms of horror and turns them on their ears.  He took on the pillars of horror, the vampire, the ghost, the werewolf, and the zombie and changed them into something new and interesting.

            The story, itself, is structured as a frame story of sorts.  It starts in the seedy side of Panama City Beach (A place I just happen to have been and imagined vividly.). The main character of the story at this point is with a little girl he has kidnapped and plans to kill.

            The whole start of the story is a distraction from what is going on.  Straub does not reveal much about the happenings to that point.  The main character seems to be schizophrenic or sociopathic. His reasons for kidnapping the little girl and planning her death seem to be delusional or at least twisted by a disturbed mind.  Straub, however, has just set his readers up and as the story unfolds, we learn that there is a logical reason for everything. 

            The story switches point of view often across the various protagonist, and even some minor characters.  At times this becomes a bit hard to follow, distracting, and bothersome.  Although it gives the story part of its richness, the shifting points of view often required flipping back to previous pages or even chapters to see who is telling the story or to re-familiarize with the character, especially when the point of view character was little more than a town person who gets mentioned a few times.  In writing, I have tried to avoid the excessive use of switching point of view for this reason.  It put a blemish on this otherwise excellent story, so I can only imagine what it would do to a story that was not of the same quality.  I actually don’t have to do that because another reading from this semester showed me that all too well. 

            For the strong points of this book, Straub knows his tale and keeps a very multifaceted plot going in a good direction.  Everything falls into place and follows the same course.  The tangential lines of the plot fit neatly together at the end, and gives the reader a great “aha” moment.  The writing toward this end was excellent.  Although the shifting points of view did muddy the waters of these diverging and converging plotlines, the characterization of the protagonists and antagonist helped to keep things straight.   His strong characterization is something that I tried to learn from after reading this story.  Characterization is one of the areas I have difficulty with.  The subtle differences between otherwise psychologically similar characters help to make the difference between characters more evident. 

            The thing that I take away more from this story in regards to writing is how the author turned the old horror standbys if not clichés into a new vital creature. The way the vampire, ghost, zombie, and werewolf were mixed into one creature.  One of the problems with horror is that so much of our writing is dependant on the cut by numbers characters.  Even the serial killer or other creature type stories have suffered from this.  Mixing the unexpected qualities of stock and standard horror characters is a great way to remodel the “classic” story.  At the time this was written, not many authors had tried this technique.  Another issue related to the writing was the ease of reading the story.  So often, writers write to the highest denominator.  They try to compensate for being genre writers by aiming high with the vocabulary.  It distracts from the story as it showcases $5 words.  Straub kept the story easy to read. The story was not simple but was still simple to read.  Being able to write a story that is as complex as this story was in a reader friendly way is the object of all writers. 

            Writing a good story can depend on many things.  Ghost Story is a good story, a good scary story.  The use of villain melding and reader friendly writing shows a wonderful way for writers, starting out or not, to pen a good story to.  Even the title adds so much to how to write.  Sometimes the best title is the short and sweet one that sums everything up.  Ghost Story, what a great title for this story.  It takes into account not only the ghostly characters but the society that tells ghost stories.  It also simplifies the story and gives the reader something she may not expect.  It is not a straight spook tale.  It was more complex.  In writing, a title should be able to do that.  I am a writer who believes in a good title.  There are many authors who do not put much thought or consideration into a title.  The same is true of editors who title stories as well.  So much can get lost from a poor story title.  Straub or his editor, whoever titled it, did a good job. 

            So what can be taken away from this story that I can use in the story.  One is the simplicity of the writing of the complicated story.  The writing was not simple but was so reader friendly it makes someone jealous of another’s talent.  I have striven to work on this in my writing.  The bending of the characters is not something that can be done well in my thesis, but I do plan on looking at using this in future writings.  Finally is the title.  I love a good tricky title.  I try my hardest to work on making good titles and I am often disappointed by a title more than any other part of writing. 

            The best thing that I can take away from this story is not anything that is written in the text by Straub. I read an edition of this book that had a forward by Stephen King.  In this forward, King tells the story of Straub and Ghost Story. It seems that this book was not the first one Straub wrote or published.  It did end up being his first success.  This is a great thing to think about while writing.  Not everyone’s first published book is a runaway success nor is the second or beyond.  Writers can still publish and not have blockbusters.  Although this cannot be incorporated into writing, it can be the platform that writing is done from. 

            There were many things that I have taken from Ghost Story to use in my own writing.  The simplicity of writing a complex story is the one I most hope to use and get better at.  Also the strong sense of characterization is another area that the book has shown me how to improve on.

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I recently finished reading Asylum by British author Patrick McGrath.  I didn't like it, not one little bit.  The problem is that I cannot read books set in psychiatric facilities because I see everything that is wrong with the story.  In this story, the asylum is in Britian and it's the late 1950's.  All the psychology is Freudian psychoanalysm which has since died away. But I write this blog to keep up with writing and why the writing is the problem.

McGrath can write.  He uses words beautifully.  This story however seemed dusty and distant.  I think he wanted it to.  The problem was that the voyeuristic tone he set for it didn't work for me.  I've read other stories told from a narrator that had to piece the story together.  These are always unreliable narrators when telling the story of another character.  The Virgin Suicides  was written in this style.  It worked better to me. I think because the narrator of that story is an adult remembering from childhood.  This made that story's unreliable narrator more realistic. 

Back to McGrath. The story did little for me.  I finished it and set the book on the floor.  I looked at my wife and said "what was the point?" 

I hate a book I finish and have to ask the question why? or what was the point?  I like to feel like I gained something from a book when I finish, and this one left me hollow. 

Like Palahnuik in a previous blog, I probably won't ready anymore McGrath.  His dusty closed in style of writing was a little to crusty British and boring for me.

Posted by Jared at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the first time I think ever, I read nearly an entire book in one sitting.  It was Off Season by Jack Ketchem.  It was not because it was such a page turner but I was stuck on an airplane. 

The story is about a bunch of inbred wild people in Maine killing and eating people.  That's pretty much it.  It tells their story and the story of the people they stalked to eat.  Only one survived and that was by luck and a very disgusting oral sex scene.  I think that I liked the sequel better. Offspring seemed to have more plot and direction.  This was an early splatter punk story, and lives up to its splat factor. 

Jack is a good writer, and distrubing in his ficition.  I read this book and it's sequel (also mentioned in an early blog entry) to help me write inbred folks better.  The characters for the most part seemed to be more slack-jawed than anything else.  They were also very sexual but kept it in the family.

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Okay, so this is not a statment about the reader.  The book is titled You Suck.  This is a book about vampires.  A great title for a vampire story, no?

The great thing about this story, written by Christopher Moore is its absurdist quality it has.  Moore writes in the absurdist style.  The characters are believable, likeable and not likeable, but they all have a goofy quality about them.  I enjoyed the way the characters seemed driven by mundane but also hilarious drives.

The two man vampires Jody and Tommie are just trying to get the hang of being vampires.  The problem is that others are out to get them.  Tommie had a gaggle of stoner friends who want to kill them.  They come into the story after squandering nearly $600,000 on a blue prostitute.  The problem is that she wants to be a vampire because she is an aging blue hooker.  (No body likes a dead blue aged hooker.)  She gets her wish and she becomes a not so nice character.  Then she turns the stoners into a gaggle of stoner vampires.  This was very enjoyable because they lament that they can't get stoned any more.  One of these vamps says "being sober sucks."

The two man vamps get a minion.  She is a goth or more properly wannabe.  She has whole chapters devoted to her perspective in her own tongue.  These chapters made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do. 

So here's the low down.  I liked this book, espcially the absurdist approach.  You laugh and are horrifed at the same time. This has piqued my interest in Christopher Moore and writing in the absurdist form. I think I blog about that topic seperately.

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I don't often finish bad books, but I had to when it came to Scott Smith's The Ruins.  This book follows a group of stale WASPY Americans in Mexico on vacation.  They end up in the jungle looking for Mayan ruins.  What they find is an abandoned mine that has wicked vines.

This was a horrible book.  The characters were stale and the plot rusty.  All they needed was some Ortho Weed-Be-Gone and the story was all over.  It was even for the fantastic world of horror unbelievable.  I wanted the main characters to be dead from about page 4.  The men were all douche bags (That is the proper terminology for such) and the women whiney.  It was like watching some god-awful MTV television show.  Real World Death Island.  With all the horror going on around them, no one seemed to think suicide the best way out.  These vines were even intelligent.  They could imitate animals, cell phones, and human speech patterns.  there was no explanation as to where they came from or anything else.  Were these alien creatures?  Curses from the Mayans?  We don't know.

Avoid this book like you would Mexico during a swine flu epidemic.

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One of the few books that I took away from high school loving very much was Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I first became fimilar with this tale in 10th grade lit class.  The book featured a chapter from the story about Lavina when she is confronted with the Lonely One.  The chapter ended with someone clearing his throat. I then read the book and loved.

So a few years ago, Bradbury released Farewell Summer the long-awaited sequel to Dandelion Wine.  I couldn't wait to read it, but I did for nearly two years.  I wish I had never read it.  This book ruined Dandelion Wine for me. 

The story never starts to make sense.  It rambled on about armies and war and had the children acting strangely adult and the oldesters strangely young.  The story ended in a such a way that made me regret the ever taking it up.  Bradbury seemed to be struggling to write this tale.  The work seems more like a beginner's work than one of an old master like Bradbury.

The story didn't even work to hard to be a sequel.  If a person didn't know it was sequel, they would never guess it from reading this book.  Also the story seemed to have time shifted from the 1920's to at least the 1960's.  It had a nostalgic feeling but like I said for a totally different decade.  This made the story much less enjoyable because I spent too much time trying to figure out why the old man called people on the telephone so much.  He was always on it.  This doesn't seem like 1920s behavior.

Bradbury is showing his age and cognitive problems in this book.  His delightful way of writing has faded away.  Farewell Summer for me was farewell to an enjoyable book I've loved for years.  It also has marked my farewell to Bradbury.  I will pick up his old works, but it has become evident that he has faded with age like an old billboard, instead of growing better like fine wine.

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When I was a kid, there was a series of books that every student tried to keep checked out of the school library.  If you got your hands on one, you were lucky.  It wasn't Harry Potter.  Those came way after my time.  It also wasn't C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicals.  It was a series of spook books by a story teller named Katherine Tucker Windham.  They were the 13 ____ Ghosts and Jeffery books.  There was volume in this series called 13 Tennessee Ghost and Jeffery.  This volume featured the following "true" ghost story.

A farmer was walking through his pasture in Eastern Tennessee.  This is an area of the state that is full of limestone outcroppings and caves.  He was walking to great some neighbors that had come to see him.  As he walked toward them, he disappeared and was never seen again.  The neighbors couldn't figure out what happened. 

An interesting thing about this area of Tennessee and limestone is that sinkholes can develop from out of nowhere at anytime.  It would seem that this farmer fell into one and the ground sort of swallowed up the hole.  Back in the 1800's, people probably wouldn't have understood this.

Now what does this old Southern ghost story have to do with The Terror, which is about a failed arctic expedition?  That's easy. Dan Simmons story is set in the bleak arctic circle.  The crews of two British ships are trapped in ice that can open up and swallow them up.  There is a scene in this book which most of the Royal Marines are killed when their tent is swallowed by the ice.  It opens underneath them, they fall in, and the ice freezes back over them.  The image of that Tennessean farmer trotting across his field then disappearing into the earth instantly came to mind. 

That is a terrifying idea, that at anytime the ground might swallow you up.  The Terror has all sorts of horrors: the great white creature, the neverending winter, the ice, the ever present fear of fire, and the unsavory characters aboard ship. 

The most unnerving part of the story to me was the ice and the closing up around people and swallowing them up.  The constant moving floor under  your feet like walking in a fun house or atop of a water bed. 

I had much rather face the great white beast or Hickey or even fire than I had the troublesome ever present and plotting ice.

I would the Alabama therapist walking across the ice field that disappeared never to be seen again.

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The Danse Macbre is an enjoyable book.  By now it is a bit outdated and could use a second edition to look at trends that emerged in the world of horror since 1981.  The book is an omnibus.  It covers film, books, comic books, television, and even radio. 

One of the things that I learned from this book is what a following horror had on the radio.  I didnt realize that happened.  I had heard of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Wells, but there were Twilight Zone like shows even on the radio.

King is a modern American product.  He does not treat the genre of horror with too much academic mumbo-jumbo.  I'm not saying that horror does not deserve that kind of scurtiny, but there are somethings that academics sometimes miss about why literature and writing works.  I speak as an academic not only of literature (thanks to Seton Hill University's program on writing pop fiction) but as a social scientist who has researched some academic fields as humor.  Something gets lost when we analyze things too much with too narrow of a microscope.  King has been quoted earlier in his career as saying that he is the literary equivilent of a Big Mac and Fries.  He is at least a Whooper by now, but brought that mentality to  this rather academic look at horror.

This book was written for the common man, not necessarily for the person studying horror or writing.  This is why the book works so well.  He also gave the wonderful lists at the end of his favorite books and movies in the genre at the time of writing.  This is a wonderful guide to learning what is good and works in horror.  I've since reading this watched some of the films.  (I've had limited time for reading currently).

All in all, The Danse Macbre was fun to read but gave something to learn as well.  It may be the fastest nonfiction book I've ever read.

Posted by Jared at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So this is it, the big bad wolf of the horror world before Stephen King.  The Exorcist one of the scariest stories of all time.  What a dud.  This book was much to slow on the uptake.  We don't even get the exorcism until the very end, and it's very brief.  The attempts to figure out Regan's problems takes more time and the murder mystery is more interesting.  The investigator is Colombo in a new form.  I had a hard time with this book and here is why.  It was like reading an archaic psychology text book.

 I've not seen so many out of date psychological terms since I took the history of psychology.  The entire book is laced with Freudian psychobabble that has long since been abandoned.  The heavy reliance on the idea of split personality, which one of the doctors is quoted as saying there has only been 100 confirmed real cases of this.  I promise it is much less.  I've never met  psychiatrist or pschological professional, including myself, that has ever seen this diagnosis.  This is saying alot because I know lots of mental health professionals.  I liked the old school medicines.  Thorazine to a child. Who in there right mind give thorazine, a very nasty medication with rough TD side effects to a kid.  Also the use of Librium.  We give that to drug addicts to get them off their junk. 

The main problem with this book is it is very out of date.  All the psychology in it is nearly 40 years old, and that's bad because we are a constantly changing science.  I must say, I wish they had let Carl Rogers work with Regan.  I think his positive self regard would have done wonders with her.  The problem is that nowadays, no one would have gone down the trails they went down with Regan. 

Another reason I have such trouble with text, is that I had trouble suspending belief.  I don't believe in modern day demonic possession, and if I did, I think that soemthing different would work better than what they did, like baptism.  It seems to me that a quick dunk under the water with a in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit would do a lot more than the 23 psalm the lord's prayer, and some sprinkles of "holy water" in the shape of a cross.  Come on, take her down to the Baptist Church and put her under the water.  There you go, no more demonic regan.

Posted by Jared at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Bram Stoker left a legacy, Dracula.  His vampire character through cinema and constant publication has become the king of the vampires.  Every vampyric  creature since his novel owes a debt to the count. 

The image of vampire and the word Dracula walk hand in hand.  If you show a picture of any vampire, be it Count Yorga, Count Chocula, the Count from Sesame Street, Lestat, and people will say “Dracula”.  The dark brooding image of Bela Legosi’s character has permanently made Dracula an archetype. 

From a writer’s perspective this can be a good thing.  It is a ready made character just add blood. (For the love of everything don’t add water.)  The problem comes from it’s too easy.  There are vampires everywhere.  They brood and look sexy and of course drinks blood.  They have become so common writing a traditional vampire story is like driving a stake into your own productivity.

In an introduction to Salem’s Lot, Stephen King wrote that he enjoyed both the Dracula-like vampires, but also the Count Orlock-type he saw in comic books.  He stated the his mother felt they were both junk.  The strange thing is that Count Orlock was a copy of Dracula. 

Now, we look at romanticized vampires that sparkle or have other extraordinary issues that are lovely.  Dracula was none of that.  He was evil and ugly. 

He is the king of the vampires, but he is not what people think he is.  They see the Bela Legosi version and think that is Dracula.  What a problem.  It is the curse of Dracula’s legacy, that and the need for more “nontraditional” vampire stories. 

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That's what she is, Regan.  She's the meanest kid since Rosemary's Baby and before Damien, but she really isn't that mean after all.  Sure she does a lot of vomitting, and she tossed that British guy out the window, but look at the carnage rained down from Damien and his followers.  Rosemary's Baby's followers killed a bunch of folks too.

Regan, even while possessed, isn't that scary.  She is just a little girl who got mixed up with a couple of demons.  Pretty typical biblical stuff.  I have to say that this character always portrayed so fiercely, really let me down.  I was very disappointed in her, very.  She would have been much scarier as Goneril (the whole STD thing is scary) like her mother wanted to name her.  The scariest thing about this poor child is that her self-absorbed mother wanted to name her from the daughters of Lear.  How very Tragic. 

Sidenote:  King Lear has one of the my favorite Shakespearean lines, "Poor Tom's a cold."

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